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In the Forums... |
Posted: July 27, 2000 Written By: Keith "Farrel" McClellan Step 1 - Crap Removal I know, this is a pretty general topic, but I'm referring to extra files and icons that you no longer need. The first step in this is to move all of that extra junk off of your desktop. You will want to delete any icons that you don't frequently use and move any files to their own dedicated miscellaneous directory on your hard drive (mine's called 'junk'). The next step is to go through and remove any temporary files that are residing on your computer. Now, you could do this the manual (a.k.a. hard) way, or you could do this the easy way and use the Disk Cleanup program (I don't believe this program is available in Win2k - you will need to do this manually). Under the Disk Cleanup tab, allow the program to remove the temporary Internet files, the downloaded program files, the recycle bin, and the temporary files. Under the more options tab, remove any unnecessary Windows components and any other applications that you no longer need. Then click ok to finish the operation. To do all of this manually, you will need to do the following: - Clean out the temporary Internet files using Internet Explorer - Use the Control Panel remove extra Windows Components and unneeded installed programs - Empty the Recycle Bin - Delete the Windows Temporary files directory (be careful when doing this - particularly in Windows 2000) The final part of this step is deleting any other extra files on the hard drive that are no longer needed. This means deleting any downloaded programs that you no longer need, as well as going through and removing any old data files that the program uninstallers didn't catch. That means going through and deleting any old save games and the like from the program files directory, as well as removing any of those now un-needed uninstall files. There is another part to this, and that is removing all of the extra files from the root directory. If you are running Windows 9x, you can remove all but the following files: Command.com Ffastun.ffa * Ffastun.ffo * Ffastun.ffl * Ffastun.ffx * Io.sys Msdos.sys Logo.sys Suhdlog.dat Io32.idx * - Deleting these files when Find Fast is installed on a system can cause the system to refuse to boot. You can, however, safely delete them if (1) you use the Find Fast applet in the Control Panel to do it, or (2) if you remove or disable the program before deleting them manually. Weird bug, huh? If you are running Windows 2000, however, you will need to be a bit more careful - but luckily, Windows 2000's file protection will stop you from deleting anything that is extremely important - but still, make sure you keep a backup of any of the files you delete and you have a working boot disk handy just in case you need to copy the files back to the root directory. |
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